Conspiracy of Details
The metamorphoses of Tolstoy's characters come about not as a lengthy evolution but as a sudden illumination. Pierre Bezukhov is transformed from an atheist into a believer with astonishing ease. All it takes is for him to be shaken up by the break with his wife and to encounter at a post house a traveling Freemason who talks to him. That ease is not due to lightweight capri-ciousness. Rather, it shows us that the visible change was prepared by a hidden, unconscious process, which suddenly bursts into broad daylight.
Gravely wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, Andrei Bolkonsky is regaining consciousness. At this moment his entire universe, that of a brilliant young man, is set rocking: not by rational, logical reflection, but by a direct confrontation with death and a long look at the sky. It is such details (a look at the sky) that play a great role in the decisive moments experienced by Tolstoy's characters.
Later on, emerging from his deep skepticism, Andrei returns to an active life. This change is preceded by a long discussion with Pierre on a ferry crossing a river. Pierre at the time is positive, optimistic, altruistic (such is that brief stage in his evolution), and he disputes Andrei's misanthropic skepticism. But in their discussion he shows himself rather naive, spouting cliches, and it is Andrei who shines intellectually. More important than Pierre s words is the silence that follows their discussion: "Stepping off the ferry he looked up at the sky to which Pierre had pointed. For the first time since Austerlitz he saw that high everlasting sky he had seen while lying on the battlefield, and something that had long been slumbering, something better that was within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul." The sensation is short-lived and vanishes immediately, but Andrei knows "that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, was alive in him." And one day much later, like a dance of sparks, a conspiracy of details (the sight of an oak trees foliage, the happy talk of girls overheard by chance, unexpected memories) kindles that feeling (that "was alive in him") and sets it blazing. Andrei, still content the day before in his retreat from the world, abruptly decides "to go to Petersburg that autumn" and even "re-enter government service… And Prince Andrei, clasping his hands behind his back, paced back and forth in the room for a long time, now frowning, now smiling, as he reflected on all those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a crime, that were connected with Pierre, with fame, with the girl at the window, with the oak, with woman's beauty and with love, which had altered his whole life. And if anyone came into the room at such moments he was particularly curt, stern, firm, and, above all, disagreeably logical… as if to punish someone for all the secret, illogical work going on within him." (I emphasize the most significant lines.) (Let us recall that it is a similar conspiracy of details- the ugliness of faces around her, conversation overheard by chance in the train compartment, intractable memories-that, in Tolstoy's next novel, touches off Anna Karenina's decision to kill herself.)
Still another great change in Andrei Bolkonsky's internal world: mortally wounded in the battle of Borodino, he lies on an operating table in a military encampment and is suddenly filled with a strange sense of peace and reconciliation, a sense of happiness, which will stay with him; this state of happiness is all the stranger (and all the more beautiful) for the enormous harshness of the scene, which is full of the hideously precise details of surgery in a time before anesthesia; and strangest of all about this strange state: it is provoked by an unexpected and illogical memory: when the doctors assistant removed his clothes, "Andrei recalled his earliest, most remote childhood." And some lines farther on: "After the agony he had been enduring, Prince Andrei enjoyed a blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life, especially those of early childhood-when he had been undressed and put to bed, and when his nurse had sung him lullabies and he had buried his head in the pillow and felt happy just to be alive-rose to his mind, not as something past, but as a present reality" Only later does Andrei recognize, on a nearby operating table, his rival, Anatol, Natasha's seducer, whose leg has just been cut off by a doctor.
The usual reading of this scene: Wounded, Andrei sees his rival with his leg amputated; the sight fills him with immense pity for the man and for man in general. But Tolstov knew that these sudden revelations are not due to causes so obvious and so logical. It was a curious fleeting image (the early-childhood memory of being undressed in the same way as the doctors assistant was doing it) that touched everything off-his new metamorphosis, his new vision of things. A few seconds later, this miraculous detail has certainly been forgotten by Andrei himself just as it has probably been immediately forgotten by the majority of readers, who read novels as inattentively and badly as they "read" their own lives.
And another great change, this time Pierre Bezukhov's decision to kill Napoleon, a decision preceded by this episode: He learns from his Freemason friends that in Chapter 13 of the Apocalypse, Napoleon is identified as the Antichrist: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." When the French alphabet is given numerical values, the letters in "I'empereur Napoleon" add up to the number 666.
"This prophecy greatly surprised Pierre, and he often asked himself what exactly would put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried, by the same system of turning letters into numbers and adding them up, to find an answer to the question that engrossed him. He wrote the words l'empereur Alexandre and la nation russe and added up their numbers. But the sums were either more or less than 666. Once when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in French, comte Pierre Besouhoff; the sum was far from right. He changed the spelling, substituting a z for the s and adding de and the article le, still without obtaining the desired result. Then it occurred to him that if the answer to the question were contained in his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he wrote le Russe Besuhof and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much; five was represented by e, the very letter elided from the article le before the word empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought: l'Russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery greatly excited him."
Tolstoy's meticulousness in describing all the spelling changes Pierre works on his own name so as to get to the number 666 is irresistibly comic: l'Russe is a marvelous orthographic gag. Can grave and courageous decisions of an unquestionably intelligent and likable man be rooted in some foolish idea?
And what are your thoughts on man? What are your thoughts on yourself?
Change of Opinion as Adjustment to the Spirit of the Time
One day, with a radiant face, a woman declares to me: "So, there's no more Leningrad! We're back to good old Saint Petersburg!" It never did thrill me, cities and streets being rechristened. I am about to tell her this, but at the last moment I control myself: in her gaze,
bedazzled by the fascinating march of history, I foresee disagreement, and I have no desire to argue, especially because just then I recall an episode she has certainly forgotten. This same woman came from abroad to visit my wife and me in Prague after the Russian invasion, in 1970 or 1971, when we were in the painful situation of being under ban. She was showing her solidarity with us, and we wanted to pay her back by trying to entertain her. My wife told her the funny story (it was oddly prophetic besides) of an American moneybags staying in a Moscow hotel. Someone asks him: "Have you been to see Lenin in the mausoleum?" And he replies: "For ten dollars I had him brought over to the hotel." Our visitors face tensed. A leftist (she still is), she saw the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as a betrayal of ideals she cherished, and felt it unacceptable that victims with whom she meant to sympathize should mock those same betrayed ideals. "I don't find that funny," she said coldly, and only our status as persecuted people saved us from a break with her.